Vancity: CX Strategy for credit cards

Vancity: Customer Experience for Credit Cards

CX Strategy

Time
4 months (2017)

About the Project

Vancity, a credit union in North America, wanted to improve the customer experience of managing credit cards to increase customer loyalty.

The Problem

Banking customer have shared their frustration when it comes to managing credit cards: from ordering a card online to changing address information, dealing with lost or stolen cards and making payments.

The objective of this project was to identify the biggest areas for improvements to create a roadmap for service updates.

Process

User Research

We started the project with getting a better understanding of current customer needs as well as their expectations by looking at the competitive market landscape.

  • Competitive Analysis: Heuristic analysis of the main competitors to identify best practices as well as solutions to be avoided.
  • User Research: Interviews of existing Vancity customers  at different stages in the customer lifecycle (planning to get a credit card, just got a credit card, using a credit card, canceled a credit card)

We shared insights with stakeholders from multiple departments, especially the developer team who were already making changes in parallel.

Customer Journey Map Workshop

The research phase helped us to identify the key points. In the next step we needed to map them out in a “customer journey”:

  • Customer Journey Map: We invited the main stakeholders from different departments (about 16 participants) to map out the customer journey (thoughts, feelings, actions and touchpoints) for 3 different personas. This exercise allowed us to identify gaps for which we gathered ideas for improvements. 
  • Dot voting: We used dot voting to collectively decide on the ideas with the highest priority that the project team would focus on moving forward. 

The outcome of this workshop was a recommended action list as an input for the project roadmap.

Customer Journey Map

Outcome & Learnings

The biggest outcome, despite concrete action items for future project work, was a shared understanding of the current customer journey with their existing pain points – and an alignment on the ideal customer journey that the project teams wanted to realize. 


Internal learnings:
  • More respect and a better understanding of the value that CX methods provide 
  • A mindset shift: projects need to include CX thinking form the beginning on to make use of the inputs

Personal learning:
  • Better coordination of CX initiatives: some recommendations came too late because the developer team was already building solutions in parallel
  • Sharing & transparency is key: Sharing insights from user research along the way prepared participants for the workshop and helped to create more empathy for customers
  • Be patient: Changing mindsets takes time 🙂